Winter Wonderland

As great as it would be to have a nice, long growing season … I wouldn’t have it any other way!

The 2011 Seed and Fruit catalogs are already rolling in, and Chris picked up a stack of gardening books from the book store the other day. Winter is a great season for gardeners. It gives us time to think about previous years, and dream about the new things we want to try in the spring. (Artichokes, perhaps? We read a very interesting article in one of Chris’s books about growing artichokes in cold climates).

One of the things that I’ve been researching is the best – and quickest – way to make our fence green. We put up a functional, but not terribly pretty, chain link fence closing in an entire acre of land. I think we are going to break down and buy 100 second year grape vines (wine, table, and cooking/jelly varieties) to plant along the 180-foot stretch of fence across our front yard in the spring. There is a Vineyard in Lake City, Minnesota that looks like it has quality plants at a pretty good price. According to one of the gardening books that Chris got, “grapes thrive in less than adequate conditions” – so with any luck, in 2012 we will see a small crop and a green fence filling in.